Monday, December 15, 2014

Is God Real?

I'm guessing that you have all heard of the "He Is The Gift"
initiative that the church is doing? If you haven't it's ok. I'm going to give
you a second chance to crawl out of that cave. Last Friday the mission
leadership met together in Scarsdale with Elder Perkins of the Seventy and 6
representatives from the mission department along with the head guys at
Bonneville Communications (the guys that put together the He Is The Gift
video). They had the New York South Mission leadership skype into the meeting
and they talked about this initiative. They have made the New York area the
focal point for the initiative. With all the money they have put into having
ads in Time Square, they want to make sure us missionaries are involved as much
as possible. As districts and a zone we have been coming up with ideas to
spread this initiative as much as possible. They have asked that as a New York
North and New York South Mission combined, we share the He Is The Gift video to
20 people a day. We have been going around showing the video on our iPads to
every person we have an appointment with and even random people we talk to
in between.

"He is the Gift" in Times Square

The Church Leadership back in Salt Lake have a Christmas wish that by the end of
the month, the missionaries in our two missions will have shared the video to
100,000 people. It's harder for us upstate to share the video with that many
people a day because we aren't usually able to talk to that many people a day. But I guess we need to show our faith. I think it's a fun thing to have us try
to reach this goal but at the same time people are getting caught up in the
numbers. After serving in Scarsdale aka one of richest zip codes in the world
where there are many Jews that don't want to hear a message about Christ, I
have learned that one way to get depressed quickly is to play the numbers game.
Some missionaries get so caught up in teaching X amount of lessons that they
forget to actually teach people.

We have been making quite a bit of sport here in Middletown. The ward
has volleyball every Friday night for anybody that wants to come. We
try to make it out to that if we can. I'm no Kizzy Willey but.... I'm getting
better. We played basketball Saturday morning with a bunch of non-member
guys. They were pretty good, better than I am. We got players that play for
local high schools to come out. A kid that played with us was visiting from The
Bronx. He played like he was from The Bronx…super flashy, a little cocky, but
will break your ankles any chance he gets. It was a good time to play some
basketball and talk a little bit about the church with guys that might not
listen in a different situation. From what I've seen in NY other than The
Spirit, sports converts more people than anything else.

A wise man once told me to choose who my heroes are very carefully
because we often emulate those people we watch the most closely. I have been
trying to study the different attributes and leadership styles from some of my
religious heroes. Obviously there is Jesus Christ who is my number one but I've
been working on emulating him my whole life. I'm going to keep trying to be
like Jesus but recently I've been studying another one of my heroes, Thomas S.
Monson. With our iPads we have access to every general conference back to 1970.
I have been reading every single conference talk he has given so I can come to
know who he is, how he became that way, and how I can become that way.
While I was studying I came across a story that he shared in one of his talks
that hit me very powerfully and reminded me that as Gods children, He is
watching out for us and we have the ability to call upon the powers of heaven
to help us. The story goes as follows.

"A few years ago, I was afforded the privilege to serve as a
mission president and became intimately acquainted with more than four hundred
missionaries. We had one young missionary who was very ill. After weeks of
hospitalization, as the doctor prepared to undertake extremely serious and
complicated surgery, he asked that we send for the missionary’s mother and
father. He advised there was a possibility the patient would not survive the
surgery.

The parents came. Late one evening, the father and I entered a hospital
room in Toronto, Canada, placed our hands upon the head of the young
missionary, and gave him a blessing. What happened following that blessing was
a testimony to me.

The missionary was in a six-bed ward in the hospital. The other beds
were occupied by five men with a variety of illnesses. The morning of his
surgery, the missionary’s bed was empty. The nurse came into the room with the
breakfast these men normally ate. She took a tray over to the patient in bed
number one and said, “Fried eggs this morning, and I have an extra portion for
you!”

The occupant of bed number one had suffered an accident with his
lawnmower. Other than an injured toe, he was well physically. He said to the
nurse, “I’ll not be eating this morning.”

As she approached that patient, he said, “I think I’ll not eat this
morning.”

Each of the five men declined breakfast. The young lady exclaimed,
“Other mornings you eat us out of house and home, and today not one of you
wants to eat! What is the reason?”

Then the man who occupied bed number six answered: “You see, bed number
three is empty. Our friend is in the operating room under the surgeon’s hands.
He needs all the help he can get. He is a missionary for his church, and while
we have been patients in this ward, he has talked to us about the principles of
his church--principles of prayer, of faith, of fasting wherein we call upon the
Lord for blessings.” He continued, “We don’t know much about the Mormon Church,
but we have learned a great deal about our friend; and we are fasting for him
today.”

The operation was a success. When I attempted to pay the doctor, he
countered, “Why, it would be dishonest for me to accept a fee. I have never
before performed surgery when my hands seemed to be guided by a Power which was
other than my own. No,” he said, “I wouldn’t take a fee for the surgery which
Someone on high literally helped me to perform.”

So far on my mission I have seen a lot. I've seen a lot of people
question if there's a God. Is there a God? Some people need evidence to
believe. At this point I would need evidence to not believe.

Godspeed,

Elder Tyler J Johanson

Elder T. and I feeling pretty unified when we went matching to our Ward Christmas Party